NEWSgrist: *Ilyse Soutine: Then Is Now*

NEWSgrist: *ILYSE SOUTINE: Then Is Now* + The Grey Album, RSS feeds, Naked Power & more...

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Vol.5, no.2 (Mar 1, 2004)

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*Underbelly*

Bulletin board: post your own news, press releases, urls:

http://pub11.bravenet.com/forum/show.php?usernum=870870569

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CONTENTS:

- *Splash* ILYSE SOUTINE: Then Is Now

- *Quote/s* Permission; Naked Power

- *Url/s* The Grey Album; Schickytapes

- *The Fog of Blog* Ryan Griffis on “reBlog” (Rhizome Net.Art News)

- *Notes From the Underground* The Grey Album protest (NYTimes)

- *Soup to Nuts* Death of the American Mag Cover (Design Observer)

- *Factory Redux* Too many galleries, not enuf art (ArtNewspaper)

- *Book Grist* Alexander R. Galloway's "Protocol"

- *Classified* Intern wanted for Williamsburg gallery

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*Splash* http://newsgrist.net

ILYSE SOUTINE

"Then Is Now"

Feb 26 - Apr 4 2004

Artist's reception: thurs., march 4th 6-8pm

Miller / Geisler Gallery

511 West 25th Street

NYC 10001

splash archived at: http://www.newsgrist.net/Splash_Soutine.html

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*Quote/s*

“...if Mr. Burton had been able to get permission to make "The Grey

Album" from both the Beatles and Jay-Z, he would probably have had to

give away more than 100 percent of his publishing rights.”

-- Defiant Downloads Rise From Underground By BILL WERDE

(see *Notes From the Underground* below)

“It's a question of naked power, of course. Artists, dealers and curators

have to kowtow to these puffed-up moneybags. Critics don't have much,

and as long as that's the case, we can tell these dorks -- invariably their

taste is awful and their manners worse -- that they're nothing but their

money.”

--Walter Robinson, Artnet Magazine “Weekend Update” Feb 27, 2004

http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/reviews/robinson/robinson2-27-04.asp

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*Url/s*

DJ Dangermouse -> The Grey Album: story + downloads

http://www.illegal-art.org/audio/grey.html

DOWNHILL BATTLE -- DJ Danger Mouse's recent Grey Album, which

remixes Jay-Z's The Black Album and the Beatles White Album, has

been hailed as a innovative hip-hop triumph. Despite that and the

fact that only 3,000 copies of the album are in circulation, EMI sent

cease and desist letters yesterday to Danger Mouse and the handful

of stores that were selling the album, demanding that the album be

destroyed.

"EMI isn't looking for compensation, they're trying to ban a work of art,"

said Downhill Battle's Rebecca Laurie.

"Special interests, including the major labels, have turned copyright law

into a weapon," said Downhill Battle co-founder Holmes Wilson. "If

Danger Mouse had requested permission and offered to pay royalties,

EMI still would have said no and the public would never have been able

to enjoy this critically acclaimed work. Artists are being forced to break

the law to innovate."

The Grey Album has been widely shared on file sharing networks such as

Kazaa and Soulseek, and has garnered critical acclaim in Rolling Stone

(which called it "the ultimate remix record" and "an ingenious hip-hop

record that sounds oddly ahead of its time"), the Boston Globe (which

called it the "most creatively captivating" album of the year), and other

major news outlets.

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_________

| |

| O O | *** www.schickytapes.biz ***

|_/=====\_|

Schickytapes is an online catalogue of selfmade mixtapes or recordings

of selfmade music. As such it is just a tool, stored somewhere out there

in the world wide web, accessible from every corner of the world. But

the real action takes place outside the web, where we meet, where we

see concerts, make music, where we make our mixtapes, broadcast our

radioshows, on the streets and situations that inspire our soundtracks.

The catalogue is a tool for people that are into exchanging music with a

very subjective touch. The mixtape works as a communicative tool that

transports personal information beyond the audio information stored on

the tape. Schickytape seeks to strengthen the network of cultural and

music exchange that connects people rather then dividing them into the

domains defined by the branding strategies of the cultural-industrial

complex...

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*The Fog of Blog*

Lost In The Blog

by Ryan Griffis

Rhizome Net.Art News, February 27, 2004

http://rhizome.org/netartnews/story.rhiz?timestamp=20040227

For those of us creating or reading blogs, using our RSS aggregators,

always looking for those collections of useful, interesting, odd, and fun

bits of information, it's all about filtering. Those feeds keep us from

having to go to all those web sites we read regularly, which could take

days the old fashioned way (yes, I'm still on dial-up). The media arts

organization Eyebeam has decided to filter further the filtered with a new

project called reBlog. reBlog features posts from a select group of other

blogs relevant to art, technology and culture. The R&D Team at Eyebeam

has hacked the popular blog creating and retrieval software packages

Movable Type and Feed On Feeds so that a guest 'curator,' or reBlogger,

can select and republish their posts of choice. It's a curated exhibition of

information. Or maybe it's more like sampling. Either way, the reBlogger

of the moment is Eyebeam's own Director of R&D, Jonah Peretti.

reBlog: http://www.eyebeam.org/reblog/

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*Notes From the Underground*

Defiant Downloads Rise From Underground

By BILL WERDE

NYTimes, February 25, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/25/arts/music/25REMI.html

More than 300 Web sites and blogs staged a 24-hour online protest

yesterday

over a record company's efforts to stop them from offering downloadable

copies of "The Grey Album." A popular underground collection of music,

"The Grey Album" mixes tracks from the Beatles' classic White Album with

raps from Jay-Z's latest release, "The Black Album."

The protesters billed the event as "Grey Tuesday," http://www.greytuesday.org/

calling it "a day of coordinated civil disobedience," during which more

than 150 sites offered the album for download. Recording industry

lawyers saw it as 24 hours of mass copyright infringement and sent

letters to the Web sites demanding that they not follow through on the

protest.

"The Grey Album" is a critically praised collection of tracks created by

Brian Burton, a Los Angeles D.J. who records as Danger Mouse. Mr. Burton

created the album by layering Jay-Z's a cappella raps from "The Black

Album," released on Jay-Z's Roc-A-Fella label, over music he arranged

using melodies and rhythms from "The Beatles," commonly known as the

White Album.

Mr. Burton did not seek permission from EMI, which owns the publishing

rights to the White Album. When EMI learned that Mr. Burton was

distributing "The Grey Album" early this month, its lawyers sent him a

cease-and-desist letter, and Mr. Burton complied.

EMI views any distribution, reproduction or public performance of "The

Grey Album" to be a copyright violation. "They may say EMI is trying to

stop an artwork," said Jeanne Meyer, an EMI spokeswoman, referring to

the Web sites, "but they neglect to understand that there is a

well-established market for licensing samples, and Mr. Burton didn't

participate in it."

Some protesters say "The Grey Album" illustrates a need for revisions in

copyrighted material, or that a system of fair compensation should be

created to allow for sampling.

"To a lot of artists and bedroom D.J.'s, who are now able to easily edit

and remix digital files of their favorite songs using inexpensive

computers and software, pop music has become source material for sonic

collages," said Nicholas Reville, a co-founder of Downhill Battle,

http://www.downhillbattle.org/ an organization of music industry activists

who promoted Grey Tuesday.

Jonathan Zittrain, a director of the Berkman Center for Internet and

Society at Harvard Law School, said the issue is indeed a gray one. "As a

matter of pure legal doctrine, the Grey Tuesday protest is breaking the

law, end of story," Mr. Zittrain said. "But copyright law was written with

a particular form of industry in mind. The flourishing of information

technology gives amateurs and home-recording artists powerful tools to

build and share interesting, transformative, and socially valuable art

drawn from pieces of popular culture. There's no place to plug such an

important cultural sea change into the current legal regime."

He said that under copyright law a judge can impose damages as high

as $150,000 for each infringement.

To create a collection like "The Grey Album" legally, an artist would

first have to get permission to use copyrighted material. Then he would

have to negotiate compensation with the copyright holder. Many artists,

however, like the Beatles, will not allow their music to be sampled. But

even if permission is granted, it is common for a copyright holder to

request more than 50 percent of publishing rights for a new song created

from the copyrighted work. So if Mr. Burton had been able to get

permission to make "The Grey Album" from both the Beatles and Jay-Z,

he would probably have had to give away more than 100 percent of his

publishing rights.

Around the same time Mr. Burton received his cease-and-desist letter, his

album was receiving critical acclaim in Rolling Stone magazine. The album

took on a distribution life of its own online, circulated via file-trading

sites and on e-Bay, where bootleg CD's were selling for as much as $80

yesterday. Two weeks ago EMI issued cease-and-desist letters to an

undisclosed number of record stores and e-Bbay sellers.

Downhill Battle went live last Wednesday with a site devoted to the

protest, Greytuesday.org. In 12 hours it had more than 40 sites signed on

to participate. Within two days, Greytuesday.org reached the top ranking

on Blogdex and Popdex, Web sites that track which sites are being linked

to from blogs.

Monday night lawyers for EMI issued cease-and-desist letters to more

than 150 Web sites participating in the protest. The letter said distribution

of "The Grey Album" "will subject you to serious legal remedies for

willful violation of the laws."

By yesterday afternoon some of the Web masters of the protesting sites

said they had served 85 to 100 copies of the album, while other reported

as many as 1,000 downloads.

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*Soup to Nuts*

The Final Decline and Total Collapse of the American Magazine Cover

Michael Bierut

Design Observer, February 18, 2004 10:07 PM

http://www.designobserver.com/archives/000103.html#more

About a month ago, I turned on the Public Radio International program

Studio 360 http://www.wnyc.org/studio360/ and was pleased to hear the

unmistakable Bronx accent of legendary adman George Lois, who was

host Kurt Andersen’s guest that morning. The talk inevitably turned to

Lois’s covers for Esquire in the sixties,

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1885254245/ref=ase_winterhouseed-20/103-0985476-9616658?v=glance&s=books

the high point of his career and probably one of the high points in 20th

century American graphic design, period. Why, wondered Andersen,

didn’t anybody do covers like these any more? They’re all infatuated with

the idea that celebrity, pure celebrity, sells magazines, growled Lois.

Exactly one week later, I served as a judge for the annual competition of

the Society of Publication Designers - http://www.spd.org/

Walking down table after table groaning under the weight of glossy

magazines festooned with photographs of celebrities (or celebrities)

Jessica Simpson, Ashton Kutcher, Carrie Anne Moss and Justin

Timberlake, it was hard to deny that Lois was right.

George Lois’s covers for Esquire provided my first glimpses into the world

of graphic design thinking. In the suburban Cleveland of my childhood

and early adolescence, Lois’s images -- Mohammed Ali pierced with

arrows a la St. Sebastian, http://www.esquire.com/covergallery/coverdetail.html?y=1968&m=4

Richard Nixon in the makeup chair,

http://www.esquire.com/covergallery/coverdetail.html?y=1968&m=5

Andy Warhol drowning in his own soup -

http://www.esquire.com/covergallery/coverdetail.html?y=1969&m=5

- didn’t look like anything else in our house. I realize now they were like

messages from another world, a world of irreverence and daring. Each

was so brutally concise, so free of fat and sentiment. They weren’t just

pictures, they were ideas. Even before I knew he existed, I wanted to do

what George Lois did. I wanted to come up with those ideas. I suspect I

wasn’t the only one.

But that was then. Today, you’d search in vain for a magazine that

commissions covers like those. The best-designed mass circulation

American magazines today Details, GQ, Vanity Fair and, yes, Esquire

usually feature a really good photograph by a really good photographer

of someone who has a new movie out, surrounded by handsome,

often inventive typography. The worst magazines have a crummy picture

of someone who has just been through some kind of scandal, surrounded

by really awful typography.

What art directors used to call the Esquire cover a simple, sometimes

surreal, image that somehow conceptually summarizes the most

provocative point of one of the stories within never found many imitators

outside of Esquire even at its peak. Certainly few editors, then or now,

were willing to imitate Esquires Harold Hayes, who gave Lois the freedom

to devise covers from nothing more than a table of contents.

And its important to remember that Esquire was famous then not only for

its covers but as the place for great writing, a place where Tom Wolfe,

Norman Mailer, Gay Talese and John Sack helped invent the New

Journalism. Indeed, it was Sacks profile of Lt. William Calley, accused of

leading a massacre of women and children in a Vietnamese village, that

inspired one of the magazines most powerful covers -

http://www.esquire.com/covergallery/coverdetail.html?y=1970&m=11

I doubt that Lois at his peak could do one tenth as much with a vapid puff

piece on Cameron Diaz.

But today I also think that there is simply a general distaste for

reckless visual ideas. In the sixties, the bracing clarity of the big idea

school of design was fresh: Lois, like Bob Gill and Robert Brownjohn and

their disciples, could rightly claim to have found a position beyond

style. But eventually the cadences of the big idea, the visual pun, began

to seem not just brazen, but crass, with all the subtlety of an elbow in

the ribs.

You can only have your rib poked so many times, and it doesn’t seem to

put you in the mood to buy things. Today’s magazine ideal magazine

cover is enticing, not arresting, aiming not for shock, but for seduction.

A George Lois Esquire on today’s newsstand would be as out of place as

an angry vegetarian at an all-you-can-eat steak dinner. And whatever

function graphic design is supposed to serve these days, ruining your

appetite doesn’t seem to be one of them.

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*Factory Redux*

Too many galleries, not enough art

By Marc Spiegler

The Art Newspaper, Feb 2004

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=11588

The market today requires that young artists have global representation,

but unless they embrace Warholesque production techniques few can

keep pace with the demand this entails.

Two minutes into our interview, the young East Village artist requests

anonymity. Usually, he is as media-friendly as they come, a buoyant

and voluble talker with an ample dose of charisma. But the topic

has turned to the problems that develop when a hot young artist starts

working with myriad galleries. In the last few years, it has become

impossible to miss work by the artist--let us call him Lorenzo--in art

fairs and magazines. His edition sizes have tripled, his prices have

doubled. Despite only truly launching his career in the late 90s, he

has already had solo exhibitions with a dozen different galleries on

several continents. I like showing all over the world, Lorenzo says.

But sometimes I feel really stretched thin--especially when I open up

my email in the morning and it takes me two hours to get through all

the different requests.

But it is not email overload that has Lorenzo hiding behind a pseudonym.

Like most artists, he had long worked with a primary dealer, who

brokered business dealings with all the other galleries. But as Lorenzo’s

market took off and more people wanted to show his work, things turned

tricky. It got to be a real problem, he explains. My primary gallery kept

making things too contractually difficult for the others--like demanding

25% consignment fees, which makes breaking even very hard

unless they sold out the show. And the primary gallery kept saying, We

can sell your work. Why do you need all those other galleries? They

would put pieces on hold instead of letting other galleries show them.

Finally, he terminated the relationship, cutting himself loose at a critical

moment in his markets development.

Once upon a time, young artists started their careers with a single

gallery in their home country. Scoring international representation was a

consecration that occurred only once the artist had an established

reputation and a proven market. But that old model has been pulverized.

Today, both in Europe and America, artists only a few years out of school

commonly have some combination of several European galleries, dealers

on both US coasts, and perhaps something more exotic, like

representation in Japan or Latin America. Yet in the same way that a

college degree has devolved from being a symbol of high achievement

to a minimum requirement for decent employment, having multiple

international galleries is now just an early step toward art world

success.

In some ways, this marks an excellent development. Artists can

transcend their domestic markets, giving them a greater chance of

finding collectors and institutions receptive to their work. But there are

also pitfalls in the new state of play, including creative burnout, feuding